How often US flights actually left on time
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics has published every US airline’s on-time record since 1987, and almost nobody reads it. This is that record, arranged the way people actually ask about it: by airport, by hour of the day, by route, by airline. These are historical odds, not forecasts. The records say what happened on this schedule over three years; they know nothing about tomorrow’s thunderstorm.
Data through June 2026 · Bureau of Transportation Statistics
One month proves nothing on its own. The national overview puts all 36 of them on one line, alongside the calendar-month pattern and the airports at either end of the table.
Four ways in
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Best time to fly
Pick an airport and read the day: what share of departures left on time in each two-hour band, Monday through Sunday.
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Route reliability
An origin and a destination, then the route’s record airline by airline — how often flights arrived on time, how late they ran when they did not, and the months to avoid.
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Airline comparison
Every reporting carrier side by side: arrival on-time rate, cancellation rate, and what the delay minutes were put down to.
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Connection risk
A layover length and an arrival airport: what share of historical arrivals would have made that connection.
The ten busiest airports
Departure on-time share over 36 months. Every one of the 363 airports in the filings has a page — the full list runs by state.
| Airport | Left on time | Departures |
|---|---|---|
| ATL Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta | 79.1% | 984,179 |
| DEN Denver | 75.8% | 933,596 |
| DFW Dallas Fort Worth | 72.8% | 933,095 |
| ORD Chicago O'Hare | 76.4% | 919,792 |
| CLT Charlotte Douglas | 75.5% | 602,695 |
| PHX Phoenix Sky Harbor | 79.3% | 582,422 |
| LAX Los Angeles | 81.6% | 577,699 |
| LAS Harry Reid | 76% | 555,303 |
| SEA Seattle Tacoma | 79.8% | 493,993 |
| MCO Orlando | 74.7% | 485,085 |
The ten busiest routes
Arrival on-time share, because on a route what matters is when you got there. All 1,000 routes are grouped by the airport they leave from.
- LAX SFO 70.1% on time · 33,701 flights
- SFO LAX 77.6% on time · 33,688 flights
- OGG HNL 87.1% on time · 33,585 flights
- HNL OGG 88.1% on time · 33,576 flights
- LGA ORD 75.2% on time · 32,930 flights
- ORD LGA 73.7% on time · 32,929 flights
- LAX JFK 80.1% on time · 30,234 flights
- JFK LAX 80% on time · 30,232 flights
- DCA BOS 76.3% on time · 27,810 flights
- BOS DCA 77.5% on time · 27,809 flights
What this site will not do
It will not tell you your flight will be late. Nothing here knows about tomorrow. What the records support is the shape of the thing — that 6am departures out of O’Hare have a much better history than 6pm ones, that July is not February, that two airlines flying the same route do not fly it equally well. Where a sample is too thin to say anything, the page says so instead of printing a number. How these numbers are put together.